Wednesday, 13 January 2016

Going against the trend

Warning: This column will offend believers in global warming and papal infallibility. Although I never joined the flat earth society and stopped believing in Father Christmas when closed-door log fires came into vogue I tend to be a sceptic on climate change. I recall how the boffins from the now extinct Wairarapa Catchment Board warned us back in 1986 that the sea at Riverdale was encroaching towards the land at the rate of a metre a year. This caused the District Council to declare a hazard zone on the beachfront houses which lowered their values considerably at the time.

Thirty years on and the last time I looked the waves were still breaking in the same place as they were in 1956 when I was a member of the surf lifesaving club at Riversdale. Australian climate change denier Trevor Sykes, who writes under the pseudonym Pierpont, reckons he’s not going to worry about sea level rises until Al Gore moves from his shoreline mansion and shifts to higher ground.

Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, who resigned from the organisation because of its slavish belief in global warming, says the science is not settled and contrary to media headlines there have been no significant warming trends in the twenty-first century. “We don’t deny the climate is changing; it always has and it always will,” Moore says, but he reckons to use the word “climate change deniers” is mean-spirited “Because it intentionally links us to people who deny the holocaust.”

Perhaps the world’s number one climate change denier however is Professor Ian Plimer, an Australian geologist whose recent book “Heaven and Hell” advised Pope Francis on the subject. Plimer says that by equating moral virtue with green left political ideology the Pope is at risk of condemning the world’s poor to eternal poverty and should not have allowed himself to be advised by green activists who have shown they are “mean, treacherous, shameless liars, who are vulgar, cowardly, anti-environmental and ignorant.”

Climate change fears will certainly have had poverty outcomes for people on the west coast of the South Island and Huntly where our once profitable coal industry sites have been shut down.

Since the alarmist International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports began coming out they have prompted substantial scientific research into climate subjects. Some research published is at odds with the IPCC computer predictions. In 2007 for example alarmists were saying the Arctic would be ice-free by 2013. Instead the Arctic summer ice stopped retreating and has begun advancing again. The European Space Agency has reported that the Arctic sea ice increased by 33 percent in 2013 and 2014.

And so it begs the question: Was the UN Climate Change Convention held in Paris last month a great waste of time and money? Probably not for the thousands who went. The first-class air-fares, top quality accommodation, and copious amounts of food and drink would have been a compelling reason to attend.

And another gem from Pierpont: “When Al Gore was born, the world’s estimated population of polar bears was 7000. Now it’s 26,000.”

Says it all really.

“Global warming - at least the modern nightmare vision of it - is a myth. I am sure of it and so are a growing number of scientists. But what is really worrying is that the world’s politicians and policy makers are not” - David Bellamy